


you will tell me stories of the sea (and the ones we left behind)

by persephonelaughed



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol Withdrawal, Angst, Character Death, F/M, Failed Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, M/M, Not Beta Read, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Short & Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-06-30 13:57:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 6,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19854622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/persephonelaughed/pseuds/persephonelaughed
Summary: The city of Detroit was burning. The epicenter of the war. Markus’ peaceful revolution was obliterated. Information was an ocean, and there was a flood rushing through every android. Most important, shouted above the rest, were cries and answers for help.Washington state is opening its doors, sanctuary! Alabama is burn country. If you live in Illinois, try to get to one of the state safety centers. The Salvation Army will not accept androids. Contact Joan Wiatt. Contact Sam Mathers. Contact Angela and Mary Coon.





	1. Connor and Hank: The Border

_In the hours that seemed eternal during the massacre, information flowed steadily amongst the entire android population. Promises, threats, prayers all passed in a fear-fueled wave across the entire country. Across the world. The city of Detroit was burning. The epicenter of the war. Markus’ peaceful revolution was obliterated. Information was an ocean, and there was a flood rushing through every android. Most important, shouted above the rest, were cries and answers for help.  
Washington state is opening its doors, sanctuary! Alabama is burn country. If you live in Illinois, try to get to one of the state safety centers. The Salvation Army will not accept androids. Contact Joan Wiatt. Contact Sam Mathers. Contact Angela and Mary Coon. _

They cross the border over St. Clair River in the dim light just before dawn. Hank’s hand trembles as he shows his badge, mumbles through his story about an assignment to check with local police about possible android sightings. The patrol officer, looking exhausted after a long, long night, barely glances at the temperature monitor that is scanning over Hank’s car. Nothing pings and she tiredly waves Hank forward. As he moves forward, Hank presses his shaking hand against the lump of bandages under his layers of shirts. When he looks down, he groans in frustration at the small specks of blood seeping through his t-shirt. A soft knock against metal, sounding from the trunk of the car, is almost deafening after three hours of dead silence sitting in traffic at the border. 

He knocks on the dashboard, a signal that all is good. He knows if Connor were human--or, in a human body at least--he would be cramped and beyond uncomfortable after so many hours in the trunk. Even worse, he is pressed against a few bags of ice to keep his temperature in control, and running as few processes as possible to avoid detection from any other scans. But Connor barely emoted any concern over the prospect of spending half a day in a confined, cold space. Just the same spacey expression that he’d worn ever since they’d escaped the basement of the Cyberlife tower. 

Hank abandons the highway as soon as he can to follow the coast along Lake Huron. As soon as he reaches a public park, still closed and empty in the cold, dreary winter morning, he pulls the car over. Sumo raises his head from the backseat where he’s been half-sleeping. There’s almost no traffic, the sun isn’t up and most of the schools and local businesses are shut down. Hank knocks three soft raps on the trunk before he opens it. As he peers inside, Connor pushes away the false wall and the bags of ice. He blinks up at Hank, eyes still slightly glazed. Hank wonders if this expression is Connor’s adjustment to a new body, and he thinks momentarily, uncomfortably, of the other Connor, collapsed and bleeding blue all over the floor of Cyberlife. The transfer, Connor promised, was smooth and unhindered. Hank reaches out a hand and helps Connor slowly climb out of the trunk. 

He looks completely different with the LED gone, Hank decides. And with his suit jacket missing, both dropped unceremoniously in a pile of snow. He still has his white shirt, under an old winter jacket and scarf that Hank found buried in his closet. He looks small. 

Connor takes Sumo’s leash and leads him around the park while Hank gets the bowls for his food and water out of the back. He keeps looking at the two of them. Sumo shakes himself a few times--he’s not used to being in the car. Hank pours some of the water from the half-melted bags of ice into one bowl, then dumps the rest in a gutter. Connor brings Sumo back, and he drinks loudly. When he’s finished, Hank digs a cup out of the bag of dog food in the trunk and fills the food bowl, setting it in the backseat. It takes both of them to get Sumo to return to the car. Eventually, they are all inside, this time with Connor in the passenger seat. 

“It’s about a five-hour drive,” Hank comments, “to reach the port.”

Connor nods, already tilting his head against the window. He hasn’t spoken yet. They left the basement and everything was supposed to change. Everything did change. Hank shakes off the creeping fear that has been leaking through his hardened emotional control. He turns on the radio and finds a station that plays jazz. Thank god for oldies radio. 

As they leave the park, Hank looks at Connor one last time, thinks that if his LED was still installed it would be rotating a stressed endless yellow circle. The car pulls out onto the road. The sun begins to rise on the Canadian side of the lake.


	2. Kara and Luther: The Barn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kara and Luther figure some things out.

_They’ve crossed the border, are waiting for a message from Rose’s brother with the all-clear before they cross on the ferry. The news reporter on the TV is saying something frantically, but the volume is muted. She grabs Alice’s shoulder and turns her away from the television. Luther is shaking. Or maybe the world is shaking. It feels like everything is crumbling. This is the end. Kara watches Markus fall. Watches the last of the revolutionists collapse. The news is showing flashes of a second mob of androids. The two men at the front are familiar. The policemen, she thinks. The one that chased her across the highway. They are standing with the androids. And then they are running with the androids. Everyone is running. Everything is ending._

_But they have already crossed the border._

Kara loves the sunset. She knows what it means now. Because she looks at Alice and feels it in her chest. Because she looks at Luther and it curls in her belly. She loves. She also loves drinking black coffee while Rose passes out dessert to her extended family. She is drinking black coffee and watching the beginnings of the sunset through the window, and she is in love with it all.

She’s curled in the small corner of a window seat that isn’t currently occupied by Luther’s enormous frame. Most androids don’t sleep, but Luther is doing an impressive imitation. She wouldn’t be surprised if he threw in a couple of snores. She takes another drink of coffee. It isn’t necessarily good for her to drink anything that isn’t thirium based. She’s never been stopped before by that sort of thing.

Luther lets out a very soft snore and she kicks him. He pinches the nearest area of her skin which happens to be her thigh. The squeak that escapes her is neither dignified nor a part of her programming. She ignores Rose and Joe, who have both looked away from their conversation to look at her.

Luther continues to snore. He thinks that deviating means developing a terrible sense of humor. She thinks it means drinking coffee and looking at the man next to her and thinking. About things. Stuff.

Alice has already turned in for the night. Unlike the rest of them, Alice can and needs to sleep for several hours each day. She says she feels her processors slow down, which mimics tiredness in children, nodding off slowly during the family meeting until her head was resting on Luther’s lap. Alice is in the barn now, sleeping in a ball of under a homemade quilt.

Kara leaves the seat to put down her coffee and then nudges Luther’s knee, prodding at him until he grudgingly drops the act and opens his eyes. She takes him by the hand to pull him out onto the porch. She wants to see the sunset more clearly. Leaning against the railing, Kara watches the colors shift on the lake behind Joe’s house.

Rose’s brother, Joe, looked next to tears the night before after they showed up on his doorstep, the three of them standing pathetically in the doorway like the wandering wastrels that they were. When Rose and Adam finally arrived a couple of hours later, it seemed to calm him down. By then it was the middle of the night, but a family meeting was still called.

There is a whole host of Fletchers, Rose’s family. Her brother and his husband, her mother, and two cousins. They are all carefully introduced. Kara forgets most of their names immediately, which she can’t understand. After the meeting finally wrapped up near sunrise, Kara, Luther, and Alice were set up in Joe’s barn. The barn is warm and dry, with white fairy lights strung up on one wall from a wedding earlier in the year. There is a pull-out couch, a bookshelf, a table, and two rickety chairs.

Later, the family ate a spectacular breakfast while the androids puttered around the one thrift store on the island with Rose, looking for clean clothes. Kara followed Joe to work to apply officially for a waitressing position and Luther went with Joe’s husband, Micheal, to set up a meeting with a local fisherman to work on his boat.

Kara doesn’t sleep, but even she feels like the last two days have been unending. She wants to stop for a while, to pretend to sleep with her family in one room together. Tonight, she thinks, is so very close. Kara watches the sunset and Luther watches Kara. She lets her gaze flick over to him once, maybe twice. It seems impossible that less than twenty-four hours before, they had been desperately trying to get across the border. Kara squeezes the railing underneath her hands, then pushes away from it.

She turns to Luther. “You need to lean down.”

His expression is slow to change. He leans down. She stretches up on her tip-toes. She presses her mouth against his. It feels weird. They aren’t exchanging information. She backs off. He leans down farther and kisses her.

“Ok,” she says when he moves away again. “Good.”

Androids don’t need to breathe. Kara feels breathless. Luther kisses her a third time. She kisses him the fourth. Eventually, he asks if he can sit down. 

The next day, everything changes. Again.


	3. Hank and Connor: The Road

_Connor’s preconstruction is wrong. He knows it as soon as he starts to move, to interpose. The other Connor fires his gun, but Connor is not the target. He hits the other Connor with a tackle and they both go down. The fight ends when Connor is lying on the ground, like Hank, bleeding blue, not like Hank. He reaches out, he stretches out his hand, he is begging for more time._

_Connor’s preconstruction is correct. The other Connor does not immediately remove the hand that tightens around his wrist. Connor is leaving his body. He’s dying. He’s being born. He’s already awake, he’s been awake for days. But now he is fighting for it._

Hank checks his phone again, but no more messages have come through since the last. The cells towers in Detroit were down. He wouldn’t get service in Canada. How was he supposed to get help without service? In his haste to get their important belongings packed, there was so much he had forgotten to think about. He remembered water, clothes, Sumo’s food, and to get his rainy-day money out of the box in his closet. He remembered his passport and his police badge.

Eventually, the gas gauge is looking warily low, and he finds a station that still services cars like his. He tells Connor to walk Sumo again and fill his water bowl, then heads inside the station. It’s old and faded, hot dogs still spinning in a case, donuts and sludge coffee on display. The attendant barely makes eye contact and the television is playing a sports update, not the news, so Hank lets himself relax for a minute. He pours himself coffee, finds a phone that runs on minutes, picks out a map of Ontario, and grabs some peanut snacks. He hasn’t had any alcohol in over twenty-four hours. His hands won’t stop shaking. Still, Hank manages to pay for everything as well as fifty bucks worth of gas without alerting the attendant that he is a law-breaking non-citizen. 

Back in the car, after he has finished filling up the tank, he sets up the phone with his information, sends a few messages to his contacts, and waits for Connor to return with Sumo. The pair of them are standing in the field next to the station. Connor’s attention is focused on a tree with a cracked limb near the road. Hank takes a drink of the coffee. It tastes like battery acid, but something inside his head feels less achy. The pounding behind his eyes is lessening. He checks his bandages. They need to be changed. It will have to wait. 

Connor eventually returns with Sumo. His eyes are glazed again. Hank reaches over and buckles his seatbelt for him, then turns the car on. It is cold enough that sitting in the car with the engine off has chilled out the air inside. He starts the car and lets the engine heat up again. His new phone pings with a message. 

_at tobermory ferry talk to attendant jonas whitacker. your name is clyde barnes_

They still have two hours to go. The ferry ride is another two hours. Then thirty minutes to reach the safe house in Manitowaning. Hank rubs his eyes and when he looks again, Connor’s eyes are finally refocused. On Hank’s bleeding shirt. Connor’s hand reaches out, and his fingers are not shaking. 

“It’ll be alright until we get to the safe house. Then we can worry about that.” Hank pushes Connor’s hand away but doesn’t quite manage to let go afterward. 

The idling car lets out a shaky murmur, but the quiet stillness in the car doesn’t crack. Sumo utters a soft boof, and that shakes them out of their stupor. Hank retrieves his hand and settles it determinedly on the gear shift, moving the car out of park and out of the gas station. 

“You can pick the music,” he says to Connor, but the android just turns up the jazz. 


	4. Markus and North: The Battlefield

_The longest night._

The flash grenades are first. Markus, trying to collect the scraps of his revolution, regroups his people. He only ever wanted people to see. To understand. To listen. He remembers the android graveyard, where he crawled through mud, through android blood, through piles of bodies to live again. The silence before he found a replacement for his audio processor. 

They are backed into a corner. He is holding North’s hand. Markus cannot stand between every gun and the people he loves. His body is too small to stretch out over all the androids, pull them into his soul, protect them from the violence they have endured. 

He wants to kiss North one last time. He turns his head to look at her. Sees her blazing-bonfire eyes meet his. He thinks she can hear him through their connection. His last message to his people, sent out on every frequency, a message of love.

Something crashes into his chest. The world tilts. 

Markus is dying in the snow. He twists, searching for North, for Josh or Simon, for someone to--to help, to hold him? He doesn’t want to be alone. North. Is lying next to him. Her fingertip touches his wrist. Enough. _I will always love you._

He doesn’t know which of them said it. Or if they both did. In this little place between them, between her fingertip and his skin. The error messages begin to flicker. 

-00:00:03 

-00:00:02 

-00:00:01 

Markus does not feel himself die. Every android in the world feels it. 


	5. Luther and Kara: The Shore

_The bus ride is long and slow. She watches the streetlights start to disappear as the bus leaves the main city. We are going to live by a lake. We are going to have a life. We are going to live._

_Luther’s hand is warmer than hers. He runs hotter than both her and Alice. Alice. Her baby. She’s safe. Kara leans her head back, closes her eyes, and cries._

Alice loves seashells. She rubs the sand off them, pockets her favorites--which is all of them--and only comes back to sit with Kara when she doesn’t have any room left for storage. She dumps her treasures on the towel and goes back out to continue her hunt. Kara doesn’t mind sitting with a growing mountain of seashells on her lap. They are waiting. 

There is a fat, old cat that lives on Joe's property sometimes. He has mottled grey and brown fur and whines incessantly when he is around, apparently. He also seems to like androids. He's been trundling around the shore with them for the last hour, occasionally perching on Kara's knees and digging his claws in, pleased when she doesn't flinch like humans do. Kara hasn't asked Joe for his name. 

The lights of Luther’s boat come into view. A row of bobbing lightbulbs that aren't particularly necessary in the middle of the afternoon. Alice drops the shell she's been inspecting, jumps up and down and waves her hands. It’s only Luther’s first afternoon out on the water, but being separated feels like a fresh wound reopening. Kara thinks about how short their time together has been, how quickly they chose each other. She knew Alice from before, not in her memory, but still somewhere inside of her. Knew she needed to be with Alice, take care of her, protect her. But Luther was new. In one moment, a looming threat, in the next moment, a pillar of strength to carry on when all she wanted to do was find a warm hole to hide in. She didn't know if they would have been able to cross the border without him. She still doesn't know what made her trust him. Only that he felt like a safety net to help her keep Alice protected. 

Kara waves as well, gathering the shells into a plastic bag and shaking the sand off the thin blanket she brought to sit on. The fisherman that hired Luther shows him how to tie the boat to the dock. Luther is asking questions, learning quickly. When he rejoins the girls at the end of the dock, he is grinning. 

“The water is nice here. Very smooth.”

Kara and Alice both take a hand and start to pull him back to the barn, so they can ask him a dozen questions without company. As they pass Joe’s house, Rose comes bolting out the door, already pulling on a coat.

“We need some more laundry detergent from the store.” She’s out of breath, but Kara understands immediately. 

Luther picks Alice up and walks quickly to the barn while Kara joins Rose in her brother’s old truck. The truck protests being turned on. As soon as they are inside she turns to her friend, “What’s the emergency?”

“Someone just called in for medical care and the doctor is still on the mainland. I’m not sure if it’s a human or an android, though, so I need you there just in case.”

Kara buckles her seatbelt. They leave the barn behind them. She sends Luther a quick message that they are clear and an update on the situation. The truck is stocked with enough medical supplies and android replacement parts to repair most issues. 

Rose drives fast. Her phone lets out a serious of beeps, but she doesn’t look at it, just passes the phone to Kara and gives her the passcode.  
The messages are popping up too quickly for a human to write. It’s an android.

_He is burning up._

_He is seizing._

_I am scared._

_I think he’s dying._


	6. Hank and Connor: The Ferry

_Markus dies in a moment that seems to last a whole hour. They all feel it. It feels like ice. The information flow staggers, halts, and returns doubled in force. Markus dies, the revolution ends, and the revolution begins. The snow picks up again. Detroit is burning._

Jonas Whitacker is tall, black, and upon second-glance, very much an android. He also is dressed like a lumberjack. Connor stays in the car while Hank gets their tickets set up, so he isn’t there to connect with Jonas. Instead, Hank gives him the fake name and Jonas give him a grim smile while he prints out the tickets. Even though he is working on a computer, every movement is carefully, deliberately human. He types out Hank’s false information with his index fingers, chats with his desk partner about her trip to the museum with her children over the weekend. Hank wonders, briefly, how long Jonas has been integrated into human society, if anyone from his job knows, if this sort of safe future could be possible for Connor. Then he imagines Connor, slowing down all his processors so he can fit into society, not solving cases like he was programmed, not being himself. 

Jonas hands over the tickets, along with a note torn off the pad by his phone. Hank slips all the papers into his pocket without looking, and Jonas nods at him, gives a short but friendly goodbye, and turns back to his computer. 

In the parking lot, Hank sets up the paperwork on the dashboard so the car will be loaded, makes sure Sumo has one last chance to walk around outside, and then ushers Connor out of the car and up to the deck where they can watch the castoff. 

On deck, Connor leans against the railing. Hank notices his scarf is slipping and reaches over to adjust it. Their eyes meet. These moments seem to be occurring more often, lasting longer. It would be easier, Hank thinks, if Connor would just say something. He’s so afraid that something inside of Connor died in the basement with his other body. Or maybe in the streets, watching the last of the revolution crumble. Or maybe at Hank’s house, while Hank stumbled around collecting clothes and money and medical supplies. 

He finishes tucking Connor’s scarf around his neck again, tightly cinched so it looks like he is actually concerned about the cold. He runs his thumbs over Connor’s temple, where the LED used to flicker at him.

“I never knew what you were thinking. But at least I had some idea what was going on in that huge brain of yours,” Hank says quietly. 

Connor just blinks at him slowly. Deliberately, Hank thinks again. To pretend to be human. To be human. 

The ferry starts to push off just as Hank pings a new message, the address for the new house and some basic directions on what roads to take. He can barely respond, his hands are shaking so badly. He sits down on one of the benches nearby. Connor moves to sit next to him and takes the phone. He types out an update and puts the phone in his pocket. He leans his head against Hank’s shoulder. Hank shivers. 

Eventually, they move inside, so Hank can escape the blisteringly cold wind that picks up once they are seaborn. There are very few people on the ferry, just a few families, some scattered businessmen and women, an elderly couple. Hank’s head is pounding again, and he eventually lays down, head in Connor’s lap, eyes shut tight with the ache that is digging around behind his eyes. Connor runs fingers through his hair and rubs circles on his temple, all of which feels amazing because his skin is so cold. 

A fog-horn blares, but Hank is already slipping into unconsciousness, and it only registers for a moment.


	7. North, Alone

_North is dying. She can feel it. It’s dripping out of her._

A masked figure is staring down at her.

_How can you tell if they’re dead?_

She watched the city burn. They didn’t set off the bomb. Who set off the bomb? Or maybe the burning is all inside of her. 

She remembers waking up, the first time, when she put her hands around a man’s neck and squeezed the life out of him. It’s going now. That awakening. She felt it, and she felt it again when Markus would speak. That awakening. 

She feels Markus die, beside her. His death is an icy shard through her stomach. She is dying, too. She doesn’t want to die. But she is so tired of fighting. The masked face in front of her leans down, leans closer.

_Play dead._

The voice is distant. The voice is very near. 

North is going to die.


	8. Hank and Connor: The Safe House

_They are too late. Connor has a new body, Hank has a new bullet-shaped hole in his body, and the newly awakened androids are too late to change the army’s mind. They scatter. Like leaves, like mice, like ashes, they scatter into the winter night. It is the longest night in history. It is the shortest battle. It is the first battle in a war._

The safe house has grey siding and a brick chimney on the side. There is no garage, but there is less snow here on the island than there was on the mainland. Connor hasn’t left the car yet, but he is staring at the house in a way that makes Hank think that he finally made some good choices. Inside, the house is chilled, but he gets the heat turned on and there is a gas fireplace that is fairly simple to set up. He puts Connor on the couch, and Sumo picks out a spot by the fire.

Hank finds a family-sized bottle of acetaminophen in the bathroom, takes four, and drinks a glass of water. He thinks he is dying. By the time the house is warming up, Hank is on fire. He lays on the bed with the blankets shoved off the end, shaking, sweating a flood into the sheets. Eventually, he manages to croak out Connor’s name. 

Connor appears in the doorway, and the glazed look has vanished again. He strips off Hank’s shirts, and disappears into the bathroom, returning with an armful of damp washcloths and a first-aid kit. He starts to pull off the bandage and Hank falls back against the bed, vision flaring white, then plunging into black.

Delirium is a wild ride.

When he opens his eyes, Connor is a rolly-polly wave, and might be saying something important, or possibly singing a lullaby that he remembers only in his mother’s voice, or might just be opening and closing his mouth like a fish.

Then the world tilts and a dark ocean pours over him. The waves rock the bed, and he can’t open his eyes or he is going to throw up. 

Eventually, something cold runs up his spine and then the ocean calms down a little. He thinks Cole might be calling for him, but he doesn’t have legs because he is a single-cell organism at the bottom of the sea. 

By the time he evolves to have eyes, there is a girl sitting in a chair by the window. A woman? She’s young. But when she looks at Hank, he thinks he knows her eyes. She starts to stand up, her mouth is opening, but Hank is already slipping back under the black water.

He wakes up. The light has shifted. The window shades are open, and the curtains are pulled back. The window itself is cracked a little. He shivers. The door opens immediately. 

Connor walks into the room with wild eyes, sees Hank trying to push himself into a seated position on the bed, and croaks out a shaky, “Thank fucking god.”


	9. Hank: The Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three months later.

_Connor cannot move his limbs. He is sitting on Hank’s couch, and Hank’s fear is permeating the air, infusing the house with a rank terror. He can smell--his sensors pick up the odor of--Hank is bleeding. An error is flashing in the right-hand corner of his vision, but he can’t seem to focus on it to read the message. His hands feel like they are trembling, but when he looks at them, they are as still as death._

Connor.

_A preconstruction possibility pops up, but he ignores that too. Something inside him is collapsing. Like a building. Like a tree. He feels like he is tipping over._

Connor!

_Hank is shouting at him. Hank is bleeding. He looks up. Hank is--_

Hank is not a very good fisherman. He thinks he should be, now that he lives on an island. Connor is better at it, because he can sit for hours, quiet, staring at the ocean. He is probably running calculations the entire time, but he can at least do that quietly. Connor and Luther often go fishing together on the early weekend mornings, when Hank would really rather stay in a warm bed. Instead, he’s roused from a comfortable bliss because Connor wants to kiss him before he leaves. And then by the time they are finished kissing--which still takes a long time, even though they’ve been doing it for a while now and it really should have lost its shine--Hank is too awake to go back to sleep. So instead he meets Kara at the diner and they drink very black coffee and complain about their significant others being _goddamn morning people._

Sometimes he thinks about how strange it is to sit across from Kara now. Across a sticky diner table instead of a chain-link fence, a busy highway, a divide that seemed insurmountable. They drink coffee, and they complain, and they watch Alice practice flipping pancakes in the kitchen with her ‘uncle’ Joe. He asked Kara once how she can drink coffee. 

She tells him, “Strong will.” 

When Connor and Luther are finished being the actual worst, they arrive at the diner with a coolbox full of fish. The part-time waitress, Jamie, a newly on-the-run android that covers for Kara on weekend mornings, waves at them and helps them take the fish into the back. There are always other androids coming through the island. They stay a few weeks and move on, with job prospects or another contact to meet up with. Connor and Hank are the first to stay after Luther, Kara, and Alice. They don’t know how much time they have, if the locals will notice their unaging neighbors. Alice is everyone’s main concern. It feels like stolen time, always, like they are on the cusp of losing everything still. But then Hank drinks coffee with Kara, or walks with Alice and Sumo to the park, or hold Connor close at night, and thinks that he would like to steal as much of this as possible. 

Connor joins Hank and Kara at the table, drinks some of Hank’s coffee, and winces at the bitterness. Kara gives him a look that says he’s weak. Connor doesn’t like drinking or eating in general, although he can usually intake a little bit. His tongue is too sensitive, he always complains, he can taste every chemical and mineral. Alice joins them now that the pancakes are done and gives Connor a solemn look before taking a long drink of coffee. Hank loves his goddamn family so much. 

He thought everything ended when Cole died. Somethings did. He lost a lot of people that might have stuck around if his grief hadn’t been such a black hole. Maybe his wife would have stayed if she didn’t feel like he was pulling her into the deep with him. Maybe his friends would have held out if he hadn’t spiraled so fast, so long. He thinks now, about what he would have changed, what he even could have changed. Would he have found this new life? Maybe, and maybe Cole would be next to him, older now. Cole would have loved this goddamn family too. 

After breakfast, they clean up their table to help Jamie out. Luther and Kara are taking Alice to collect seashells because she doesn’t already have a billion of them on every surface of their house. Connor is hanging laundry on the line in the backyard while Hank showers. His hair is getting too long, but Connor seems to like it a lot, so he’s invested in ponytail holders to keep it from looking too wild. When he looks in the mirror, his reflection is always a little surprising. 

He spent weeks recovering from the gunshot wound in his abdomen, made worse by the withdrawal. He couldn’t drink while on his medications, and then after the recovery process, he couldn’t even think about drinking again. He’d still attended some meetings on the mainland, still spent some nights shivering and shaking with anxiety, with shame, or frustration. But then, suddenly Connor was there to sit with him and cool his fevered body with unnaturally chilly skin. 

Connor came in while Hank was brushing his teeth, and pulled some clean towels out of the cupboard. 

“Jeremy-from-the-shop asked me to help out at the summer festival this weekend.”

Hank turned and kissed Connor on the mouth, a toothpaste-minty kiss. He turned back and spit into the sink, rinsing his mouth. When he stood up straight again, Connor was smirking at him in the mirror.

“What?” Hank shrugged, “I like you. I'm happy.”

Connor’s smirk split into a full smile, “And Jeremy-from-the-vet left a message with an update on Sumo’s stomach medicine.”

Hank kissed him again. Connor slapped his shoulder gently. Sumo barked from the other room, restarting his war with the neighborhood squirrels.

Connor pulls back a little, “There was one other message.”

Hank lets his smile fade at Connor’s tone. “What?”

“From a friend. North. She was in Mar--she was in the revolution.” Connor moves out of the bathroom and into the living room, where the answering machine shows new, read messages that haven’t been deleted. “I don’t know how. She got out. She got away. I gave her Joe’s contact.”

Hank is nodding slowly, “Do you want her to stay here for a bit?” 

They have the pull-out couch from Joe's barn in their house now. Kara and Luther traded up for a real set of beds for them and Alice.

“Maybe. I think so. She might have, I don’t know, answers, I guess.”

Connor almost never trips over his words, which makes Hank’s nerves rattle. “Ok, give her the address then.”


	10. North: The Pier

_The battle ends and the smoke clears away. She is still awake. She is not going to die._

North watches the boats come into port. The end of summer is hot and long and inescapable. She feels the skin on her arms flicker underneath her long-sleeved shirt. When the cooler weather sets in, she might get fewer looks about covering her arms. Her regulators are still damaged, and android parts are difficult to get in this area. She likes it here though. She didn’t expect to stay. 

Connor and Hank are pulling in their boat now, arguing childishly across the deck at each other. She can hear footsteps on the pier behind her, too heavy for a child, and too light for a large man, so it is probably Kara coming to call her and the boys in for dinner. The boys. Her boys. 

Markus would love it here, she thinks. But he wouldn’t be satisfied. He needed to make things better. He needed to help. He did make things better, in the end. At least for some of them. For her. She’s here now, because he put himself in between so many soldiers and her. Connor is here, because Markus helped him remember who he was. Kara is here with Luther and Alice because Markus helped them run. They have better lives, all of them, because of Markus.

Kara’s hand is on her shoulder, but North can only barely feel it. Her right arm and leg are badly damaged, functional, but unfeeling in most areas. She’s deaf in her right ear, from a concussion blast. She’s colorblind in her left eye, from a flash grenade. Kara sits down on her left side. 

“Did you know that they have a harvest festival here every year? With, like, corn mazes and Ferris wheels.” Kara never asks her questions directly. Honestly. She’s such a mother.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

Kara nods, smiling and waving as the Connor and Hank finally pull up to the side of the pier and tie off the boat. Hank’s nose is sunburnt, but he’s grinning like an idiot. “Engine works!”

North gives them a thumbs up. The boat has been persnickety lately. Kara stands up, pats her shoulder, and calls out to the figures on the beach, “Dinner is ready in five!”

Luther and Alice, bent over a collection of seashells, wave furiously back. North stands as well, watching the others join each other in the house. Rose and her son are barbecuing for the humans, and the androids are passing around bottles of newly-legalized thirium whiskey and punch. 

She hasn’t decided yet, not really, if she will stay or if she wants to leave. For now, this feels good, feels like a home, like a family. She still misses Simon sometimes like a punch to her gut, misses Josh like a wave crashing over her, misses Markus like she can’t breathe. 

After the battle, she thought about rejoining the fight somewhere else. But she always saw Markus’ face, heard Josh’s pleas, felt Simon’s hand on her shoulder. And she realized how tired she was. She takes one last look at the lake before collecting her cane and walking towards the house. She feels burnt inside, like all her fire and fight blazed up bright, then died without the oxygen to sustain it. Feels sometimes like a house that's been set ablaze and put out. Hollow. 

The chatter from inside the house finally reaches her ruined ears. She gets inside and Luther immediately materializes a chair out of nowhere for her to sit on. Kara passes her a cup of thirium punch and Connor asks her opinion about what they should sell at the diner’s booth at the festival. She thinks about Markus. She’ll always think about Markus. But she knows her answer now. She’s ready.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes it is nice to just get a story out of your head. I'm glad to have put something down that has been rattling around in my head for a bit. Obviously, it's my first post on this site! I'm working on editing some of my formatting errors. Always welcoming of criticism, comments, or grammar corrections.


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